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1945
1944 1945 1946 Events * Federal Hourly Minimum Wage is raised from $0.30 to $0.40 an hour. * Future London Mayor Ken Livingstone is born in Lambeth. * Jacques Doriot dies. * Wake Island Rail becomes extinct. * Tahitians are granted French citizenship. * Henri Charriere escapes from French Guyana from the last time and makes a new life as a citizen of Venezuela. Timeline January * January 1: Last known German infiltration of spies into the United States during World War II as 2 are landed from U-boats in Maine. * January 12: Soviet Red Army reaches the Vistula River in Poland. * January 13: Victor Sorge espionage ring member Branko de Voukelitch dies in a frigid prison in Hokkaido. * January 17: Soviet Red Army reaches the ruins of Warsaw. * January 30: In Sonnenburg Prison the Soviet Red Army discovers the bodies of 800 mostly foreign prisoners who had been executed by the retreating Nazis. February * February 6: Bob Marley is born. Positive Vibration. * February 7: Conservative British MP Reginald Purbrick stands in the House of Commons to demand to know why Dresden, Feiburg and Würzburg had not yet been bombed? (In effect, why hasn't the war crime of aerial boombardment of civilians been more total?). * February 14: FDR and King Ibn Saud meet aboard the U.S.S. Quincy, anchored in the southern portal to the Suez Canal. Ibn Saud brings bedouin guards, household slaves and the royal astrologer. * February 23: U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark rescinds the order of his predecessor, Francis Biddle, for the arrest of Issei publisher Shiro Toda, owner of the Japanese Publishing Company. March * First Bern Incident * March 1: John F. Kennedy is honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy with the full rank of lieutenant. * March 3: Lessing House in Brunswick is destroyed in an Allied air raid. * March 9: Japanese Imperial Army launches Operation MEIGO, a coup de main against the French colonial state in Indochina. * March 16: RAF Bomber Group No. 5 bombs lovely and previously untouched Würzburg with 256 high explosve bombs and 397,650 incendiary sticks, destroying 90% of the city in 17 minutes. The death toll is approximately 5000, with many dying of asphixiation as they huddled in cellars. * March 22: Victor Sorge espionage ring member Mizuno Shigeru dies in prison. * March 27: Last of 1054 V-2 rocket attacks on the UK. The first was on September 8, 1944. * March 28: American troops enter Wiesbaden, Germany. * March 30: In violation of the Geneva Conventions, captive German U-boat commander Paul Just is beaten unconscious by a civilian interrogator from the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence wearing a U.S. Navy uniform, Jack Henry Albertini. April * April 4-20: Texel Mutiny. * April 15: Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is liberated. * April 12: President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies; Harry Truman becomes President. * April 13: Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson delivers speech to American Society of International Law in Washington, DC. Demands an actual tribunal for Nazi Germany's leaders. * April 17: Japanese militarists install puppet Tran Trong Kim administration in Hue, Vietnam. * April 28: Benito Mussolini is executed. * April 30: Adolf Hitler commits suicide in his bunker as Berlin falls to the Soviet Army. May * May 2: Field Marshal Albert Kesselring surrenders the German Army in northern Italy. * May 3: French puppet ruler Vietnamese Emperor Bao Dai issues decree declaring a moratorium on the collection of agricultural loans. * May 8: Germany capitulates. The Second World War in Europe officially ends. * May 19: Captured German U-boat commander Frederich Steinhoff commits suicide in his cell rather than continue being beaten by thuggish U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence interrogator wearing a U.S. Navy uniform, Jack Henry Albertini. June * June 17: Ken Livingstone is born. July * 5:30 a.m. Mountain War Time, July 16: The Manhattan Project, led by Robert Oppenheimer, is a success, as the first atomic weapon is tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, 200 miles from Los Alamos. * July 17: Potsdam Conference begins (ends on August 2, 1945). August * August 2: Potsdam Conference ends. * August 6: The first wartime use of an atomic weapon destroys Hiroshima. Three days later, the United States drops a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, Japan. * August 8: Soviet Union declares war against Imperial Japan. * August 13: World Zionist Congress in Basle demands that British Mandate Palestine be opened to immigration by one million Jews. * Augsut 14: Japanese Emperor Hirohito announces Japan's capitulation. * August 15: Japan surrenders. World War II ends with an official treaty signing on September 2. * August 16: Viet Minh attack and take Tan Trao in Tuyen Quang province. They are equipped and trained by the U.S. OSS. * August 17: Soviet Red Army invades Japanese Sakhalin, executes the mayor and police chief of Esutoro (Uglegorsk) and 170 civilians commit hara-kiri. * August 17: Non-Viet Minh activists in southern Vietnam organize the United National Front (mat Tran Quoc Gia Thong Nhat). * August 19: Viet Minh launch insurrection with a mass demonstration at the Hanoi Opera House. * August 22: Soviet submarine torpedoes Japanese refugee ship off Hokkaido, kiling 1,700 civilians. * August 23: Last day of Soviet aerial bombardment of refugee packed Toyohara railway station. * August 25: Soviet Red Army Marshal K.A. Meretskov, commander of the 1st Far Eastern Front chooses Pyongyang over Hamhung as the location of the 25th Army HQ. No Korean was consulted in the haphazard decision. As a consequence, Pyongyang will become the capital of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea or North Korea. * August 31: U.S. Pres. Truman urges that Britain allow 100,000 Jews to immigrate to British Mandate Palestine. September * September 1: Harry S. Truman gives a brief speech: "Announcing the Surrender of Japan (September 1, 1945). Describes the evil done by the Japanese as the responsibility of "the Japanese war lords." Best quote: "This is a victory of more than arms alone. This is a victory of liberty over tyranny." * September 2: Ho Chi Minh proclaims the independence of Vietnam. * September 4: British and Dutch decide that the principles of the Civil Affairs Agreement for Sumatra will apply to the entirety of the East Indies aoccupied by the British. * September 5: Report by U.S. Army investigator Henry Schneider accuses the German branch of Ford of serving as "an arsenal of Nazism, at least for military vehicles" with the "consent" of the parent company in Dearborn, Michigan. * September 14: Sovit Union demands United Nations Trusteeship of Tripolitania. * September 28: U.S. Pres. Harry Truman issues the Truman Proclamation laying claim to the continental shelf adjacent to U.S. land territory. This sets off a cascade of similar claims by other states. * September 30: Future Israeli PM Ehud Olmert is born. October * October 3: Soviet authorities in the Soviet Zone of occupaied Germany promulgate first agrarian law redistributing ownership of all estates over 100 hectares. * October 8: Sugamo Prison in Tokyo is liberated. Imprisoned Victor Sorge espionage ring member Max Gottfried Freidrich Clausen is freed. He and his Anna later settled and live out their years in East Germany. * October 15: Former French Prime Minister Pierre Laval is executed as a traitor. * October 20: USAMGIK establishes Syngman Rhee as head of the South Korean provisional government. * October 24: The United Nations is founded in San Francisco. * October 30: Brigadier Mallaby assassinated in Surabaya. * October 30-31: Radio Surabaya broadcast messages telling Indonesians to stop fighting and accept the British miltiary occupation government. November * November: Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo and Yasuda zaibatsu voluntarily disband. * November 10: British move the 5th Indian Division into Surabaya to reinforce the 49th Indian Infantry Brigade. * November 11: Imprisoned former German Lutwafe chief Hermann Goring states: "The victors are the judges...I know what's in store for me." * November 19: John Dos Passos arrives in Nuremberg to observe the war crimes trials. December * December 6: U.S. loans Britain $3.75 billion. * December: Egyptians demands revision of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty. * December 20: Future Colorado Republican anti-immigrant pol Tom Tancredo is born. This son of Italian immigrants will make a career out of politically scapegoating Mexican immigrants. * December 21: General George Patton dies in Heidelberg after beign injurfed in a traffic accident follwoing a pheasant shoot near Mannheim. * December 24: Nicholas Meyer is born.